Best Design Practices for Landing Pages

If you are a marketer, you probably already know the importance of landing pages. This dedicated stand-alone page guides users to perform a single action. If designed well can draw the visitor to click your call to action button and enter your marketing funnel. The main difference between a home page and a landing page is that landing pages are usually designed for a single purpose. Home pages are cluttered and have a variety of offers while landing pages forces visitors to focus on an action you want them to take.

The improve optimization of a landing page, you have to improve each element on your landing page. This helps increase conversions. Finding out more about your audience will help you create pages they expect to see and like. Usually, the bulk of optimization is done after landing pages go live. At this stage, you can make the necessary changes to your page as you observe and analyze data and your conversion rate.

If you are looking to improve your pages, you have to follow industry best practices for Landing page optimization. This means that you would have to rely heavily on conversion rates and strong data. Landing pages should ultimately serve as a tool to draw and retain customers. Let us take a look at individual elements of a page. Landing pages should ultimately serve as a tool to draw in and retain customers. Let us take a look individual elements of the page and how it can be improved for better conversion.

1. Showcase your offering

Human beings make decisions based on their cognitive biases and past experiences. You can design your landing pages to take advantage of this fact. This means that your landing pages would have to have elements that can evoke a strong emotional response from the user. By making your customer feel smart, inspired and appreciated you can help guide their buying decisions.

2. Simplify your landing page

Simple pages often work better than cluttered ones. Having a clearly defined headline/subheading with a strong CTA button usually does the trick. To efficiently communicate a brands message designers have to stick to tried and tested rules of visual design. If you look at the example below, you’ll see how the elements are small enough to fit in the navigation bar and the text container with CTA button stands out on its own.

3. Contrast

Use contrast to your advantage. This also helps create a visual hierarchy that helps engage users in a way that monotone pages do not. If you look the example below, you’ll see that the white text on a textured black background makes the headline, logo and the CTA pop.

4. The content above the fold.

By keeping important parts of the element above the fold, you are increasing your chances of having users see your content. Most visitors don’t take the time to scroll down to see more information — to be sure to place important headlines, and CTA button above the digital fold. It is also easy to use a scroll map to identify the location of the fold on different devices.

5. Scarcity technique

Use the scarcity principle to your advantage. It compels your visitors to take action immediately. By activating a limited time offer, you are actually creating a unique value proposition.

6. Keep CTA text clear and simple.

CTA shouldn’t confuse your user. It should be clearly defined and offer a concise description of your value proposition. So ideally you would want to stay away from complex offers. Here are some really good examples:

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7. Contact Info

Landing pages should provide contact info and this can be incorporated into the page in different ways. You can choose to have links for contact pages or simply put the name, email address and phone number on your landing page. There are different ways to access contact info – a well-designed landing page usually has clearly defined contact links or sections that customers can easily access.

8. Headline and copy

Content draws people into your webpage. Have words set the tone of your web page. People read what you write — so make sure to choose a tone that can help you reach your target audience. Also, try A/B testing to see what headlines work best for your pages.

9. Consistency

Visual consistency matters a lot when it comes to landing pages. To keep the voice of your brand consistent across all platforms, you have to under their perceived images and keep the two consistent. So make to pay attention to the color story, imagery, tone, text and feel the same throughout all marketing channels.

9. Testimonials and social proof.

Landing pages should be designed to include social proof. Having testimonials of people you have worked with helps people know that other businesses have used your products and services. This helps in building their trust and improves the overall conversion rate as a result.

10. Form Lengths

Form lengths vary depending on your product or service. Some businesses think that short forms work better than long forms. This means that they usually just want designers to include email addresses on the page. But if you are looking to showcase an expensive product or service, sometimes longer forms tend to be more effective. This could eventually turn into more qualified leads.

11. Optimizing your landing page

To optimize your landing page, you have incorporated specific keywords into your headline, body text, images and more. This way, you are increasing your chances of being encountered by your user.

12. A/B Testing

A/B testing can help you design pages that convert really well. The more tests you run, the more accurate your elements become. After you have run the tests and collected data you need, you can apply that learning to rework the pages you designed. By checking each element on the page with a couple of different variants, you are bound to come up the most effective and desired solution. Use this to improve your conversion rate

By understanding each step of the process and figuring out what works best for your landing page — you can convert your leads. Having good strategies in place and understanding real user data will help you design pages that are not only beautiful but also convert well.